The campaign against the Armenians has been labelled by the NSW parliament, the Vatican, France and, just this week, Germany as a "genocide", and is generally accepted to have begun in earnest with the arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders – most of whom were later deported or executed – on April 24, 1915, the day before Anzac forces landed at Gallipoli.

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That the film is being released in the US on the centenary of what has become known as Genocide Remembrance Day has added insult to injury for members of the Armenian diaspora, including American-based filmmakers Garin Hovannisian and Alec Mouhibian, whose own film addressing this history, 1915, opened last week.

In attempting to see Gallipoli through Turkish eyes, has the film gone too far?

In an open letter addressed to Warner Bros, which is distributing The Water Diviner in the US, the pair wrote that Crowe's character discovers "that the Turks were never really his enemies. In fact they were the noble victims who ultimately triumphed against the imperial West in World War I."

That is, in fact, much as Andrew Anastasios, the co-writer of the film (with Andrew Knight), describes it in an opinion piece published on Thursday.

Seen through Turkish eyes, he writes, Gallipoli is "a story about a nation, the new Turkish republic, forged in the furnace of battle … the undeniable truth is that Australian troops invaded a sovereign state with the goal of occupying its capital".

The trouble with that retelling, Hovannisian and Mouhibian argue, is in what it omits from the story.

Russell Crowe plays Joshua Connor, a man who goes to Turkey after the war to find the bodies of his three sons.

"April 24, 2015 also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, which was perpetrated by the very Turkish government whitewashed by The Water Diviner," they write.

"It was on April 24, 1915 – the night before the Gallipoli landing – that the Young Turk regime set into motion its unprecedented plan: the efficient deportation and slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians and the destruction of their homeland of thousands of years. To this day the Turkish government denies that a genocide ever happened."

Using a form letter, correspondents of both Greek and Armenian ancestry, writing from Australia, the US, Israel, Germany and elsewhere, have expressed their outrage at the film's depiction of events – particularly a scene in which Greeks attack a Turkish military train and are labelled as "Satan's army", as well as the general absence of reference to what was going on in 1919, when Crowe's character is in Anatolia.

"I am writing this letter to express my shock at the false portrayal of historical events in the Russell Crowe film The Water Diviner," the letters begin. "The film is presented as being 'inspired by actual events', but as a person whose family has been deeply affected by the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Government during that period (1914-1923), I can say that the events in the movie are far from the truth. In fact, they are a gross distortion of it.

"If a film depicting Adolf Hitler as a hero and the Jews as terrorists were made, the reaction would be one of shock and outrage. Russell Crowe's film is a distortion of history that only serves to appease Turkey and its continued agenda of genocide denial."

Australian historian Professor Peter Stanley suggests that rather than a deliberate distortion, the problem with the film is most likely that Crowe, like his writers, has "entered a highly contested historical arena … without any idea of what he was getting into. His response was to simply roll over and accept the Turkish version."

Of course, the cynical might suggest that there may well have been commercial reasons for doing so.

The Anzac story presumably has little relevance to Greek or Armenian audience, but a retelling that is more sympathetic to the Turkish view was always likely to fare well in that market.